Death by Powerpoint

How to do good presentations ...

(Best played via the "Open in new window" button)

Gliding into Green Day Out inspired me to update my ebike log http://goo.gl/R2o6

Some of the many features of Green Day out: Meeting and talking -

1. about other eBikes and bicycles, especially to Mark Allen and Peter Gorden, who have built a few e-cars and e-bikes. See their websites, Plugincars and HybridHonda. Having read their websites, I thought I had better get my own one updated. Also bicycle restorers (recyclers?) at the Bicycle Revolution. 
2. about great and tasty organic food, eg from Roar Food
3. to solar panel installers

Dozens of other stalls

Live music

Posted via email from davidtangye's posterous

The end of an era of printing

My 2nd ever printer, a faithful old HP Deskjet Plus, bought late 1980's, is finally sent to printer heaven, aka the Gold Coast Suntown tip. Since I have not used a printer for several years now, preferring to leave trees where they are, in the ground, growing, I finally got around to clearing this old workhorse out from under a bed. Its ink cartridges are too expensive to buy, at $50 each, or $30 for refills, when I might then at best print 10 pages per year before they would dry up. Better to get printing done at Officeworks if necessary. Mostly however, documents are exported as .PDF files and emailed for people to read using Acrobat, xpdf or a browser-embedded whatever. Farewell 20th century. Farewell printer.

The guy at the tip gate said to chuck it in the landfill. The council has no recycling facility for electronics hardware on the Gold Coast. I left it where metals get put for recycling. Hopefully one day plastics and electronics hardware will be recycled from there too.

I was down at Gecko today. Every time we spoke of an event, the nice old lady there tried to foist another page of A4 or a brochure related to it onto me. People have to stop consuming forests every time they go to communicate something!

Happy ensconsed at Fisherman Wharf tavern. FIRST beer going nicely.

(From my mobile phone)

As a boatload of people arrive to witness the event!

Google holds back on hiring the best talent - Techworld.com

Google holds back on hiring the best talent - Techworld.com

"It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google"

A great example of why Google will succeed in the long term where Microsoft is a failure.

Google, Oracle and many other companies have always looked at their position as being co-operative where possible, whereas Gates and his bastard son Ballmer never understood that. They wanted to crush everything around them, seeing them as competition to be eliminated. Like only children, they never learnt to play with others unless it meant they could incorporate a Machievellian scheme in the plot somewhere to wipe out the others one by one. They never wanted to play the game, but to own and control it, and be the star and only player on the field. To their credit Google and Oracle have always had a more civilised view of the world around them, and their more respectful place within it.

GCLUG meeting topics

Add your topic to present at a Gold Coast Linux Users Group meeting.

Business phones, personal tools, employee choice and empowerment.

To me, this article "Is the Apple iPhone a business phone? - Mobile OS - ComputerworldUK" raises a more interesting issue. It implies that many corporates never did understand and take on the cornerstone concept of "Universal Responsibility" within the world of Quality. They still try to dictate and control their employees, instead of guide and learn from the smarter and more progressive of them. They try to dictate which mobile device is "approved". The same "Network Nazis" block access to many internet sites and facilities on the basis that any visit to them could not be for any corporate benefit. This is an arrogant and/or outdated military attitude that assumes that quality and excellence flows from the top of organisations to the serfs at the bottom. In many institutions this is a great indicator of the abundance of mediocrity that is deeply embedded into the institution, and a good sign to not have anything to do with them, beyond perhaps a quick "hit and run" sale.

Sending blog posts with photos from the mobile phone

This photo was sent from my mobile phone directly to this blog. It is promising technology, but something (perhaps either my LG phone, or the Virgin email setup, or both) is still a bit buggy. I have so far had success sending:

1. simple text emails;
2. this photo with a text signature (sent via
   • selecting a photo, then selecting to send it, rather than
   • select to compose an email, then attach the photo file).

The objective is to take a photo when out and about, and add a minimal amount of text at that time, since I find it too inefficient to do this via phone keypads, then send it as a blog post. More text can be added later, as I have done here.

15 Rules for Business Bloggers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing

The article "15 Rules for Business Bloggers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing", which I found at The WebMarketCentral Blog, has some good ideas about blogging: why one might do it and how to be effective. It skirts the issue of ROI, an issue I find most interesting.

I think that many people simply blog because they feel the need to do so, with little regard for any reader. Is this the tormented artist in many of us, struggling to express themselves? How many artists, say they produce their art for themselves, and as a therapy with little regard for any consumer. ROI is therefore not expressed as a $sales return / hour expended, yet in the long-term there is either a perceived sense of satisfaction, or a real $'s return somewhere. Anyway, I do not intend to start blogging about blogging. It a tool to use presumably for a greater end than itself.

The future of collaboration - here now.

Two great reasons to clear your desktop and move to a world of better communication and integration with your associates, customers and audience.

Google Docs in Plain English: collaborative creation of content, made easy.

Add in Google Wave for a full and rich collaborative environment.

Flogging Molly - The Worst Day Since Yesterday

Larf til ya cry, cry til ya larf!

Meetups: where cyberspace REALLY supports the real world

Now here is a shining example of a really useful Web2 facility: The Meetup website. I am using it quite a lot lately, to get about and interact with like-minded people here on the Gold Coast. Meetups is an especially useful facility, as the Gold Coast is a place where many newcomers are always arriving and many are 'net savvy and therefore look to this sort of facility to find their way around.

'Green Drinks Gold Coast' is the first Meetup group that I am involved in.

I have just found how to get Meetup notifications via an RSS feed, ie into my Google Reader account, which is where I get all my news etc. This results in all the local meetings that might be of interest to me being aggregated into my favourite feed reader (Google Reader), where I can keep track of them... Nice.

Worldfocus.org’s OLPC Rwanda Video | One Laptop per Child

Worldfocus.org’s OLPC Rwanda Video | One Laptop per Child: March 30, 2009: Worldfocus.org has produced a good video report that describes OLPC Rwanda’s plans to provide computer access to the country’s 2.3 million schoolchildren. Note the discipline and pleasant respect shown by the children. How does this compare to those in the Australian educational system? Which group even speaks English better, and is better spoken? Which group shows more courtesy, respect and self discipline?

Linking to an OLPC XO via vnc

This screenshot is taken from my desktop, running the Vinagre vnc client on Ubuntu Intrepid. I can move the XO's mouse cursor from the desktop PC, and hovering over menu items pops the menus open. However that is as much control as I can currently achieve. I cannot send keystrokes nor mouseclicks from the desktop PC to the XO, so I cannot control the XO from the desktop PC. It wold have been especially nice to be able to use teh desktop PCs keyboard. Perhaps I should forget the vnc approach, and just plug a USB keyboard directly into the XO.

OLPC XO testdrive

This post is created on an OLPC XO. The keyboard is far too small for an adult touch typist though, so the rest of this post will be done from a standard PC.

Now editing from the 'safety' of my normal PC.
I have borrowed this XO from the OLPC Club Gold Coast to check it out, and see what if anything I might do with them, especialy to support development of software for them, or support their adoption in general. Findings so far ...

0. The XO found our local wifi router, and accepted the WPA passphrase. On reboot it's automatically reconnecting - nice.
1. My PC here has a normal keyboard, so I can touch-type. One downside of the XO is that it might give rise to a generation of kids that type via "hunt 'n peck".
2. The XO has just been tested in sunlight, where ...
2.1 ... I downloaded the vnc server "Activity" (ie software package) from the OLPC support wiki. This should allow me to control the XO from a vnc client on my desktop PC.
3. It's not fast, and its not hard to have it appear to freeze while its beavering away in the background trying to play catchup. This must be a plan by the OLPC folk to teach kids patience.
4. There is no point 4, mate. :-)
5. The camera tool (Activity) is nice. I took the pic shown onscreen, and shared it. I guess the other 3 or 4 nodes that I see in the 'mesh' view might be able to see it.